Tag Archives: proposal

Earlier this year T.M. Lewin joined the dotmailer family, and we’re delighted to have them! They had an incredibly unique and large scope that involved both Enterprise Onboarding and Abandoned Cart Onboarding services and required extensive involvement from the Professional Services and Customer Success teams. This included myself (Digital Marketing Specialist (DMS) – Onboarding and Managed Services), Custom Technical Solutions, Deliverability, Creative Services and 3rd line Support.

This was such an enjoyable project to work on, especially with the relaxed yet motivated vibe we experienced with the T.M. Lewin team. We all pulled together, knew what needed to be done and when it needed to be done by. Communication internally and externally was clear, and we had set goals to strive towards.

I joined one of the final pitches with Sales, and, from an onboarding perspective, I feel this really helped the client understand how we work. Plus, it provided them with a great experience to meet the long-term team before signing on the dotted line. We covered at top-level how we work, how other teams would be involved and what a project plan would look like with an onboarding of this size.

Overall, our involvement in those pitches – as part of the longer-term team – helped us set clear expectations, develop cross-departmental timelines and ascertain who the points of contact were for certain queries.

Enterprise Onboarding

Essentially, this is a more complex onboarding process across a longer timescale. It involves frequent contact with a designated DMS (weekly catch-ups etc.) as well as more support and guidance from the Key Account Management team. T.M. Lewin came on board as a Key Account client, and they were delighted with how the whole process went.

Abandoned Cart Onboarding

Separate, yet similar to general onboarding; your DMS will work with dotmailer 3rd line and your developer/agency to implement this product. It involves more technical heads and can take longer to implement as every ecommerce platform behaves differently. To find out more about Abandoned Cart onboarding and who and what’s involved, you can take a look at this overview for the marketeer.

Testimonial from Richard Jones, Head of CRM at T.M. Lewin

When we were looking for our new ESP, we needed a flexible platform that allowed us to access the power within our data; simply, quickly and effectively. Our old platform was clunky, rigid and slow. Not ideal when you’ve got big ambitions.

Throughout the pitch and integration, dotmailer – both as a platform and a team – offered us the perfect blend of simple UI, expert technicians and brilliant tacticians to help us map out our world and our future ambitions.

Across every point, from data integration, onboarding and the first steps towards a new, fully automated, scientifically fluid world, they’ve been proactive, warm and brilliant.

The T.M. Lewin team is small, not particularly technical, but still brilliant so we needed a fair amount of hand holding through the onboarding. dotmailer’s expertise, response times and the simplicity of advice they’ve offered, particularly Shan (DMS), Ross (Key Account Management) and Darryl (Head of Custom Technical Solutions) has been integral to getting us up to speed with not a single road bump. Impressive.

In a nutshell…

This onboarding was a great experience for myself and the various teams involved. We had a lot of opportunities to test our knowledge and gained some really useful insight and information from a more technical perspective.

It’s been a joy getting involved in the technical scope and implementation; I have to thank David Gibbon and Boris Maslennikov in particular, whose expertise helped guide what was an unusually structured project.

I thoroughly enjoyed looking at T.M. Lewin’s existing customer journeys, scoping out new ones and seeing how we can use insight data to refine the user experience. Given the chance, I’d definitely onboard these guys again.

Want to know more?

Want to know more about the managed services add-ons, plan credits and onboarding packages available to you?

Before you start reading, I want to say that I am not an analytics expert per se, but a strategic SEO and digital marketing consultant. On the other hand, in my daily work of auditing and designing holistic digital marketing strategies, I deal a lot with Analytics in order to understand my clients’ gaps and opportunities.

For that reason, what you are going to read isn’t an “ultimate guide,” but instead my personal and practical guide to content and its metrics, filled with links to useful resources that helped me solving the big contents’ metric mystery. I happily expect to see your ideas in the comments.

The difference between content and formats

One of the hardest things to measure is content effectiveness, mostly because there exists great confusion about its changing nature and purpose. One common problem is thinking of “content” and “formats” as synonyms, which leads to frustration and, with the wrong scaling processes present, may also lead to Google disasters.

What is the difference between content and formats?

Content is any message a brand/person delivers to an audience;

Formats are the specific ways a brand/person can deliver that message (e.g. data visualizations, written content, images/photos, video, etc.).

Just to be clear: We engage and eventually share the ideas and emotions that content represents, not its formats. Formats are just the clothing we choose for our content, and keeping the fashion metaphor, some ways of dressing are better than others for making a message more explicit.

Strategy, as in everything in marketing, also plays a very important role when it comes to content.

It is during the strategic phase that we attempt to understand (both thanks to our own site analysis and competitive analysis of others’ sites) if our content is responding to our audience’s interests and needs, and also to understand what metrics we must choose in order to assess its success or failure.

Paraphrasing an old Pirelli commercial tagline: Content without strategy is nothing.

Strategy: Starting with why/how/what

When we are building a content strategy, we should ask ourselves (and our clients and CMOs) these classic questions:

Why does the brand exist?

How does the brand solidify its “why?”

What specific tactics will the brand use for successfully developing the “how?”

Only when we have those answers can we understand the goals of our content, what metrics to consider, and how to calculate them.

Let use an example every Mozzer can understand.

Why does Moz exist?

The answer is in its tagline:

Inbound marketing is complicated. Moz’s software makes it easy.

How does Moz solidify its “why?”

Moz produces a series of tools, which help marketers in auditing, monitoring and taking insightful decisions about their web marketing projects.

Moreover, Moz creates and publishes content, which aims to educate marketers to do their jobs better.

If you notice, we can already pick out a couple of generic goals here:

Leads > subscriptions;

Awareness (that may ultimately drive leads).

What specific tactics does Moz use for successfully achieving its main goals?

Considering the nature of the two main goals we clarified above, we can find content tactics covering all the areas of the so-called content matrix.

Some classic content matrix models are the ones developed by Distilled (in the image above) and Smart Insights and First 10, but it is a good idea to develop your own based on the insights you may have about your specific industry niche.

The things Moz does are many, so I am presenting an incomplete list here.

In the “Purchase” side and with conversion and persuasion as end goals:

Home page and “Products” section of Moz.com (we can define them as “organic landing pages”);

Content about tools

Free tools;

Pro tools (which are substantially free for a 30-day trial period).

CPC landing pages;

Price page with testimonials;

“About” section;

Events sponsorship.

In the “Awareness” side and with educational and entertainment (or pure engagement) purposes:

The blogs (both the main blog and UGC);

The “Learn and Connect” section, which includes the Q&A;

Guides;

Games (The SEO Expert Quiz can surely be considered a game);

Webinars;

Social media publishing;

Email marketing

Live events (MozCon and LocalUp, but also the events where Moz Staff is present with one or more speakers).

Once we have the content inventory of our web site, we can relatively easily identify the specific goals for the different pieces of content, and of the single type of content we own and will create.

I will usually not consider content like tools, sponsorship, or live events, because even though content surely plays a role in their goals’ achievement, there are also other factors like user satisfaction and serendipity involved which are not directly related to content itself or cannot be easily measured.

Measuring landing/conversion pages’ content

This may be the easier kind of content to measure, because it is deeply related to the more general measures of leads and conversions, and it is also strongly related to everything CRO.

We can measure the effectiveness of our landing/conversion pages’ content easily with Google Analytics, especially if we remember to implement content grouping (here’s the official Google guide) and follow the suggestions Jeff Sauer offered in this post on Moz.

On the other hand, we should always remember that the default conversion rate metric should not be taken as the only metric to incorporate into decision-making; the same is true when it comes to content performance and optimization. In fact, as Dan Barker said once, the better we segment our analysis the better we can understand the performance of our money pages, give a better meaning to the conversion rate value and, therefore, correct and improve our sales and leads.

Good examples of segmentation are:

Conversions per returning visitor vs new visitor;

Conversions per type of visitor based on demographic data;

Conversions per channel/device.

These segmented metrics are fundamental for developing A/B tests with our content.

Here are some examples of A/B tests for landing/conversion pages’ content:

Title tags and meta description A/B tests (yes, title tags and meta descriptions are content too, and they have a fundamental role in CTR and “first impressions”);

Prominent presence of testimonials vs. a more discreet one;

Tone of voice used in the product description (copywriting experiment);

Product slideshow vs. video.

Here are a few additional sources about CRO and content, surely better than me for inspiring you in this specific field:

Measuring on-site “editorial” content

Here is where things start getting a little more complicated.

Blog posts, guides, white papers, and similar content usually do not have a conversion/lead nature, at leastnot directly. Usually their goals are more intangible ones, such as creating awareness, likability, trust, and authority.

In other cases, then, this kind of content also serves the objective of creating and maintaining an active community, as it does in the case of Moz. I tend to consider this a subset, though, because in many niches creating a community is not a top priority. Or, even if it is, it does not offer a reliable flux of “signals” so as to appropriately measure the effectiveness of our content because of pure lack of statistical evidence.

A good starting place is measuring the so-called consumption metrics.

Again, the ideal is to implement content grouping in Google Analytics (see the video above), because that way we can segment every different kind of editorial content.

For instance, if we have a blog, not only we can create a group for it, but we can also create

This are just three examples; think about your own measuring needs and the nature of your content, and you will come out with other ideas for content groupings.

The following are basic metrics that you’ll need to consider when measuring your editorial content:

Pageviews / Unique Pageviews

Pages / Session

Time on Page

The ideal is to analyze these metrics at least with these secondary levels:

Medium / Sources, so you can understand what channel contributed the most to your content visibility. Remember, though, that dark search/social is a reality that can screw up your metrics (check out Marshall Simmonds’ deck from MozCon 2015);

User Type, so to see what percent of the Pageviews is due to returning visitors (a good indicator of the level of trust and authority our content has) and new ones (which indicates the ability our content has to attract new potentially long-lasting readers);

Mobile, which is useful in understanding the environments in which our users mostly interact with our content, and how we have to optimize its experience depending on the device used, hence helping making our content more memorable.

You surely can have fun also analyzing your content’s performance by segmenting them per demographic indicators. For instance, it may be interesting to see what affinity categories of your readers there are, depending on the categorization used in your blog and that you have replicated in your content grouping. This, in fact, can help us in better understanding the personas composing our audience, and so refining the targeting of our content.

As you can see, I did not mention bounce rate as a metric to consider, and there is a reason for that: Bounce rate is tricky, and its misinterpretation can lead to bad decisions.

Instead of bounce rate, when it comes to editorial content (and blog posts in particular), I prefer to consider scroll completion, a metric we can retrieve using Tag Manager (see this post by Optimize Smart).

Finally, especially if you also grouped content for outstanding format used (video, embedded SlideShare, etc.), you will need to retrieve users’ interactions through Tag Manager. However, if you really want to dig into the analysis of how that content is consumed by users, you will need to export your Analytics data and then combine it with data from external sources, like YouTube Analytics, SlideShare Analytics, etc.

The more we share, the more we have. This is also true in Marketing.

Consumption metrics, though, are not enough in order to understand the performance of your content, especially if you strongly rely on a community and one of the content objectives is creating and growing a community around your brand.

I usually add comments into these Metrics, because of the social nature comments have. Again, thanks to Tag Manager, you can easily tag when someone clicks on the “add comment” button.

A final metric we should always consider is the page value. As Google itself explains in that Help Page:

Page value is a measure of influence. It’s a single number that can help you better understand which pages on your site drive conversions and revenue. Pages with a high Page Value are more influential than pages with a low Page Value [Page Value is also shown for groups of content].

The combined analysis of consumption and social metrics can offer us a very granular understanding of how our content is performing, therefore how to optimize our strategy and/or how to start conducting A/B tests.

On the other hand, such a granular vision is not the ideal for reporting, especially if we have to report to a board of directors and not to our in-house or in-agency counterpart.

In that case being able to resume all these metrics (or the most relevant ones) in just one metric is very useful.

How to do it? My suggestion is to follow (and adapt to your own needs) the methodology used by the Moz editorial team and described in this post by Trevor Klein.

What about the ROI of editorial content? Don’t give up; I’ll talk about it below.

Measuring the ROI of content marketing and content-based link building campaigns

Theoretically measuring the ROI of something is relatively easy:

(Return – Investment) / Investment = ROI.

However the difficulty is not in that formula itself, but in the values used in that formula.

How to calculate the investment value?

Usually we have a given budget assigned for our content marketing and/or content-based campaigns. If that is the case, perfect! We have a figure to use for the investment value.

A complete different situation is when we must present a budget proposal and/or assign part of the budget to each campaign in a balanced and considered way.

In this post by Caroline Gilbert for Siege Media you can find great suggestions about how to calculate a content marketing budget, but I would like to present mine, too, which is based on competitive analysis.

Here’s what I do:

Identify the distinct competitors which created content related to what we will target with our campaign. I rely on both SERP analysis (i.e.: using the Keyword Difficulty Tool by Moz) and information we can retrieve with a “keyword search” on Buzzsumo.

Social shares per kind of social network (these are available from BuzzSumo). Remember that some of these social shares can be tallied by sponsored content (check this Social Media Explorer post about how to do Facebook competitive analysis).

Consider the delta between what the client/company invested in content marketing (or link building, if it is moving from classic old link building to modern link earning) before, as well as the median investment value of the competitors.

Calculate and propose the content marketing / content-based campaign’s value in a range which goes from “minimum viable budget” to “ideal.”

Reality teaches us that the proposed investment is not the same than the real investment, but at least we then have some data for proposing it and not just a gut feeling. However, we must be prepared to work with budgets that are more on the “minimum viable” side than on the ideal one.

How to calculate revenue?

You can find a good number of ROI calculators, but I particularly like the Fractl one, because it is very easy to understand and use.

Their general philosophy is to calculate ROI in terms of how much traffic, links, and social shares the content itself has generated organically, hence how much it helped saving in paid promotion.

If you look at it, it reminds the methodology I described above (points 1 to 7).

However, when it comes to social shares, you should avoid the classic mistake of considering only the social shares directly generated by the page your content has been published.

For instance, let’s take the Idioms of the World campaigns Verve Search did for HotelClub.com and which won the European Search Awards.

If we we look only at its own social share metrics, we will have just a partial picture:

Instead, if we see what are the social shares metrics of the pages that linked and talked about it, we will have the complete picture.

As you can imagine, you can calculate the ROI of your editorial content using the same methodology.

Obviously the Fractl ROI calculator is far from being perfect, as it does not consider the offline repercussion a content campaign may have (the Idioms of the World campaign was organically published in a outstanding placement on The Guardian’s paper version, for instance), but it is a solid base for crafting your own ROI calculation.

Conclusions

So, we have arrived at the end of this personal guide about content and its metrics.

Remember these important things:

Don’t be data driven, be data informed;

Think strategically, act tactically;

Content’s metrics vary depending on the goals of content itself.

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I’d argue that our most beneficial adaptation was our propensity to be social. While many other animals are also social to some degree, humans combined the advantages of the pack for defense and hunting with a brain capacity that allowed advanced levels of communication.

That social instinct combined with speech gave us an extraordinary survival ability that led to us becoming the dominant species on the planet.

This article isn’t a science lesson, but I’m proposing thatunderstanding the social and interpersonal aspect of our humanity is crucial to effective marketing.

Now that may seem like a “duh” to many of you. You get that in this social web era brands need to be more “human” and be more “engaging,” that they need to foster real “conversations.” However, in this article I’m going to contend that no brand is really fully tapping into the potential of any of those social marketing aspects until they are doing so with real people: actual company representatives who become the “face” for that company in its content and social media interactions.

I intend this as a follow-up and further development of my last two articles for Moz:

Both of those articles were about Google Authorship, a Google Search feature that no longer exists. Yet it is my strong belief that the principal value of Authorship is alive and well. That is, there is tremendous value in having a recognized personal brand with trusted, authoritative content, connected to your company brand.

This article will explore that principle value in four parts:

The power of a social brand

The power of brand EAT (Expertise, Authority, Trustworthiness)

The power of the personal for social EAT

Putting the power to work

Parts one and two are introductory. They lay the groundwork for what I see corporate personal brands doing most effectively. If you think you have a good understanding of why brands need to be social, and how expertise-authority-trustworthiness contribute to real business goals, then feel free to skip straight to part three.

Parts three and four demonstrate how the power of a social brand that understands the value of expertise, authority, and trust can be supercharged by tying itself to powerful personal brands.

1. The power of a social brand

Before I build this out any further, I want to distinguish between what I’m calling a “social brand” and the popular term “social business.” A social business is defined either as a business that invests heavily in social causes, or as a business that encourages its employees to be active online on behalf of the business. The latter type of social business is probably more effective in being a social brand, but it is not necessary to be a social business to be a social brand.

So what do I mean by a social brand? Simply this: a social brand is a brand that actively pursues use of online social platforms for the purposes of marketing and branding by taking advantage of the full spectrum of social interactions. In other words, a social brand does not just post to social networks. It actively engages there, seeking to enter into and create relevant conversations with real people.

Coca-Cola and Denny’s Restaurants are examples of social brands by that definition. Coke’s Hub Network command center follows a listen > analyze > engage process to catch relevant online conversations, quickly assess whether Coke has something to contributed, and when it does, create social engagements that enhance the conversation and win the brand new fans and friends.

Denny’s has a much smaller social team, yet they have proven themselves just as agile and creative as Coca-Cola in developing conversations around their brand. They built on the idea that the kinds of conversations people have online are similar to the chats people have with friends around a diner table to develop their “America’s Diner” brand.

In both cases, these brands were able to use social conversations to enhance and reinforce the kinds of associations they wanted people to have with their brands.

On social networks brands have the opportunity to share content and engage in conversations that build the expertise, authority, and trust that make real people more likely to buy from them when that moment of decision comes. In the next section, we’ll explore the value all that brings to a brand.

2. The power of brand EAT

What is brand EAT? The EAT acronym comes from the most recent version of the perennially-leaked Google Quality Rating Guidelines, the handbook for training the humans who help evaluate how well Google’s algorithm does at assessing the quality of web sites. Google now wants those evaluators to focus on three main quality criteria: Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness (hence EAT).

Even though those are criteria for determining quality as a search ranking factor, we should realize that Google emphasizes them because they are the “in real life” factors that affect how real people evaluate not only web pages, but entire brands. Let’s briefly explore each factor.

Expertise

People want to do business with brands that seem to know what they are talking about. Even though it’s generally cheaper and more convenient for my wife and me to deal through big box home improvement chains, we go to our local independent hardware store whenever possible. Why? We got tired of sales people at the big box stores who knew less than we did about paint or roofing materials or lighting fixtures. Our local storefront hardware supplier has won our loyalty and business because he’s always able to answer our questions.

It can work the same way online. I’m severely graphically challenged. When it comes to creating effective visuals for my content, I’m a great nuclear physicist (and I had to look up how to spell nuclear!). But via some social media shares I ran across the very helpful design tutorials at Canva.com. Those guides were so helpful, they caused me to want to look into Canva’s user-friendly image creation tool. And now I’m a loyal customer.

Authority

Authority is expertise taken to the next level. You can be an expert in your topic and just be crying out in the desert, but when people start listening to you, recommending you, and resharing what you say, you’ve graduated to the authority level.

At the risk of being slightly sycophantic to my publisher, I’ll point to the Moz brand as being a recognized authority. Through the high level of content associated with Moz, whether on this blog, in Whiteboard Friday videos, or at conferences, a great many people have high confidence in pointing to Moz and having their own names associated with Moz in the areas of SEO and digital marketing in general.

When I’ve published here in the past, I noticed that within seconds of my post going live, people were already sharing it on social media. Given the length of my posts, they can’t possibly have read them in that time! But that’s where the Moz authority kicks in. People have learned to have confidence that if Moz publishes it, it must be good. And so they hit that share button even before they read. Of course, that makes me always want to bring my A game when I write here!

The value for Moz is that the authority generated by their high quality content gets associated with the tools and services they sell.

Trustworthiness

It’s difficult to tease out trustworthiness from the other two factors, as it seems to me to be a natural by-product of expertise and authority. In other words, people are willing to place their trust in a brand that has helped them, enriched their life in some way, or to which others they trust point as being worthwhile.

Just as in human relationships, brand trust is never instantaneous. It has to be earned over time. And so I might propose that trustworthiness is the time dimension of the expertise and authority factors. Another way of saying that: trustworthiness is reliable expertise leading to true authority expressed consistently over time.

If you’re a regular consumer of content online, inevitably you’ve reached a point when you had to make decisions about whom you’re going to give your limited attention. Brands that have achieved trustworthiness with you are far more likely to be on that short list. And they are therefore much more likely to be top-of-mind when you are in the marketplace.

The missing dimension

As important as expertise, authority, and trustworthiness are for establishing quality, standing alone I believe they lack something that could bring them to life and make a brand truly stand out from the crowd. In the next section I’ll unveil that missing dimension.

3. The power of the personal for social EAT

The fourth dimension

Back in elementary school you probably learned that we live in a three-dimensional world. The dimensions of length, width, and height create space, the place in which we live and move and have our being. When you advanced further in your education, you probably heard, though, that a universe does not exist by space alone. Space must be accompanied by a vital fourth dimension: time. Time allows for motion within space, and everything we know and love comes from that.

I believe the three “EAT” dimensions described above (expertise, authority, trustworthiness) also need a fourth dimension to bring them to life and set them in motion.

That fourth dimension is the personal.

What makes us humans

Remember my little evolution lesson at the top of this article? I highlighted two characteristics of humans that contributed powerfully to our ability to survive and thrive:

Our innate desire to be together, especially with our families and tribes.

Our ability to communicate.

Together, those two factors not only contributed to human survival and development, but eventually enabled what we call civilization.

While most marketers don’t have goals quite as lofty as civilization building, we do want to do more than survive. We want to build our own brand empires, so to speak. In that endeavor, the social and communicative aspects of humanity are our allies, just as they were to the very creation of humanity.

Face up to it

Take a look at the image below. What do you see?

Of course, it’s a common US electrical outlet. But I’m betting you couldn’t help seeing a human face. The mere suggestion of two eyes and a mouth in the right configuration, surrounded by a circle, and our brain fills in the rest. What’s more, doesn’t this “face” suggest to you some emotion? Perhaps fright, or dismay? Pretty powerful for a piece of plastic from a hardware store!

Scientists call this phenomenon pareidolia. It’s the persistent human tendency to see human faces even in inanimate objects. The fact is that as humans we are powerfully drawn to other humans. So powerfully that we often project human attributes on to non-human things. That’s why we can even speak of “humanizing” brands, brand “personalities,” and brands being “social.”

But even though it is possible for faceless brands to achieve a certain level of humanization and socialization, there is no substitute for the real thing. That is, the power of human connection is most powerful when it occurs between two or more real human beings.

Even Google understood it

Even though Google recently abandoned its Google Authorship program that displayed a face photo (sometimes) and a byline name in search results for content by qualified authors, the fact that the experiment lasted three full years demonstrates that Google understands the power of a personal connection.

I find it interesting that Google has retained Authorship-style snippets in personalized (logged-in to a Google+ account) searches for Google+ posts by people you have circled.

That means that even if Google decided Authorship snippets were too much for regular search, seeing a name and a face are still powerful and useful signalsif that name and face are familiar to the searcher.

So it stands to reason that when a real face and name become associated with authoritative, trustworthy content, people will more naturally make a personal connection with that content. And they will look for that same face in the crowd when they need to know more.

Let our powers combine!

Let’s put this all together now.

We’ve already seen the power of EAT, that a combination of expertise, authority, and trustworthiness adds up to real value, something Google thinks worth recommending as a valuable exchange for your time after you click.

We’ve also seen that humans connect most easily and naturally with other humans, and those associations can be long-lasting and sought after when accompanied by the EAT attributes.

So here’s the simple idea, the thesis of this entire article:Your brand will most rapidly and successfully gain the social trust of its audience when it is closely associated with powerful personal brands.

The long journey home

When your brand begins to market, a journey has begun. You hope to get prospects to join you in your journey. Your authoritative, relevant content is the table you set to entice those prospects to board your train. But you still need to extend an invitation, and invitations are most powerful when they come from someone we know and trust.

It’s the difference between getting a flyer in my mail box inviting me to try out a new restaurant, and a friend calling me up to ask me to come along with him to check it out. I’m much more likely to go in the latter case. Now imagine how much more powerful that invitation would be if my friend were a respected restaurant critic, who had already visited the eatery and was now telling me I shouldn’t miss it!

Why wouldn’t you be using the method that is more likely to get more people on board your brand train faster, and with more confidence about their decision.

A challenge to all brands

Before I get into my recommendations for how to put the power of personal brands to work for your brand, I want to issue a challenge.

I know what I’m asking here seems like a huge hurdle for many brand marketers. Once upon a time all you had to do was put ads in the right places and hope the right people would see them and be moved by them. Then along came the Internet and search engines, and suddenly you had to be producing authoritative content to attract traffic and give that traffic the confidence to buy from you.

You’d no sooner put in the hard work and investment to build all that content then along came the social web. Now you’ve got to make personal connections with your prospects and engage them in ways that they will pay attention to your content, come to trust your brand, and eventually become customers.

In some ways the journey has become longer, but it can also be much more richly rewarding. Helpful, engaging content channeled through social connections can bring exactly the right people to your cash register at exactly the right time.

And now I come along wanting to add more engines to your already hard-working customer journey train. But I wouldn’t ask you to do that unless I myself had seen how much faster those new engines can drive the train.

Here’s my challenge: In the coming year,hire and/or cultivate from within at least one powerful personal brand intimately associated with your brand who represents you via his or her content and social presence. Make this one of your highest marketing priorities.

I believe with all my heart and mind that as the great battle for attention heats up in the years to come, those brands that had the courage and foresight to put their best personal brand representatives on the front lines will emerge the winners.

Objections, Your Honor!

Whenever I push this challenge, whether while speaking at a conference or conferring with a client, I tend to get the same objections to the proposal that brands put real people front and center in their marketing:

Wouldn’t it be better for our content to be branded with our company name/logo?

When social media started to become an emerging marketing channel in 2006, Erica Campbell Byrum couldn’t even access it because of IT department blocks at her company. She tirelessly campaigned for the value of social media, and eventually won over senior management.

She went on to create and champion online brand ambassadors for each of their 65 offices around the country. Erica always set the example and model, steadily building her own online audience. Based on overwhelmingly positive data showing how here efforts brought ForRent and Homes.com real business, the company expanded her responsibilities to oversee a 20-person social media team.

Erica is now the unmistakable face of the ForRent and Homes.com brands. Her engaging social presence led to invitations to speak at huge industry events, and eventually to New York Times Best Selling author Jay Baer selecting her to co-author his latest book, Youtility for Real Estate, vastly increasing her “youtility” to the brands she represents.

As an anchor for KOMU-TV news, Sarah Hill made TV journalism history when she became the first television newsperson to incorporate Google+ Hangouts and Google Glass into her online newscasts. She became an early Google+ celebrity, where she now has 2.7 million followers. She went on to become the live video spokesperson for Veterans United Network, a mortgage lending service for US military veterans. She used her journalism skills combined with her vast social following and reputation to create a strong association between VUN and various veterans causes. As a result, VUN has become a first choice for veterans looking to buy homes.

Space doesn’t allow for dozens more stories I could include, but here’s a list from Rand Fishkin of people he knows whose powerful personal brands helped build their company’s brands: Heather Brunner at WPEngine, Hilary Mason formerly of Bitly, Oli Gardner with Unbounce, Caterina Fake at Flickr now Findery, Dan Shapiro at Robot Turtles, Sean Ellis of Qualaroo, Marie Steinthaler of HopsterTV. (Rand told me he had to stop the list there or he could go on all day!)

How to make best use of personal brands for your brand

Now on to how to make this work for you and your company. My recommendations are based both on my own experience as well as my careful observations of top-performing personal brands like those listed above.

The Right Stuff

When I look at people who have built influential personal brands and try to assess their common qualities, the old nature vs. nurture conundrum always surfaces. Does someone have to have an innate gift and the right personality qualities to be effective in this role? I won’t try to solve that here, but whether natural or developed, people who do well representing their brands in public tend to exhibit the following characteristics:

Likability. I put this first because even though it is the hardest characteristic to quantify, given how much the effectiveness of a personal brand is dependent on the ability to make personal connections, the tendency to be well-liked is key. That doesn’t at all mean someone who sacrifices personal integrity or refuses to take a stand in order to “win friends and influence people.” A truly likable person can maintain relational ties even through disagreements.

Smarts. By this I mean the person has to have a deep understanding of your business and your marketplace. They really should be an expert in at least some aspect of your business. You’re looking for the kind of person who in a press conference or Q&A session could authoritatively answer most any question thrown at him or her.

Gift of gab. Here I don’t mean “chatty,” but rather someone who truly enjoys getting into conversations about his or her passions and interests. They should feel comfortable in front of a camera or life audience. She or he should also have the ability to create coherent, compelling content that displays your brand’s attributes and expertise.

Integrity. This person should be someone you trust enough to be on their own without bringing embarrassment to your brand. For a personal brand to be effective, the person can’t be babysat every moment. They need to have the flexibility to respond and engage when the opportunity arises, without having to vet everything through the home office.

Remember that your hope is for the qualities of the personal brands representing your business to “rub off” on your brand. People will make this transference quite naturally, so make sure you have the right people in place.

Insource vs. Outsource

The first question you’ll face once you are convinced of the value of developing personal brands for your company is whether to develop them from within or recruit them (or even outsource entirely).

In my experience developing your personal brand representatives from within, from existing employees, is going to have the most impact and be most effective. Your own people know your brand best and (we hope!) will have real passion for it. The advantage here is that training is minimal so content creation and social audience building can commence immediately. The only downside I see is that many companies, especially smaller ones, may not have a person who fits the bill readily at hand.

In such a case it may be necessary to recruit someone who can become your personal brand representative. In fact, that’s how I ended up representing Stone Temple Consulting. CEO Eric Enge had come to know me online. While he was already a very effective personal brand for STC in his own right, Eric had grown the company to a place where he was ready to expand its inbound marketing efforts. He saw that the content I was producing and the audience I had attracted were both highly relevant to and valuable for Stone Temple. So he made me an offer I couldn’t refuse: come be yourself for us. I’m pretty good at being myself, so I accepted (and haven’t regretted it for a moment!).

The least desirable choice, in my opinion, is completely outsourcing your personal brand representation. In other words, hiring a freelancer to create content and speak and engage on behalf of your brand. This might be better than nothing, but since I believe the best personal brand representatives grow out of a vital relationship with the brand they represent, I doubt it can be as effective. Your best bet here might be simply to get some recognized subject matter experts to publish content on your site, rather than try to palm them off as actually representing you. Inauthenticity gets sniffed out way too quickly these days.

Even if you don’t currently have any in-house, ready-for-prime-time stars in your stable, I would invest in ferreting them out and nurturing them to where they can do the job.

Give them creative space

If a personal brand representative is going to be effective for you, they have to have the freedom to create and experiment. Of course, that doesn’t mean without any guidelines or boundaries, but if you give your representatives too little freedom and initiative, you risk squashing the very thing that would make them most productive for you.

Make sure you have a good, clear mutual agreement with your personal brand rep of how your brand is to be represented. He or she should feel completely at home with your brand’s values, chief goals, and tone.

It’s also important that you give your representative the time they need to do their job. If you’re serious about getting the most benefit for your company from what they do, then their work as your representative should be their primary—perhaps only—responsibility. Creating great content and engaging with your audiences both take a lot of time to do well.

Make the brand connection clear, but subtle

Because you’re obviously hoping for the reputation, trust, and authority your personal brand representative builds to reflect on your brand, you might be tempted to push the connection too hard. By that I mean pressuring the representative to mention your brand frequently or even to be “selly” in her or his content and engagements.

In my experience that’s a mistake. If you push the corporate connection or sales pitch too hard, you kill the goose laying the golden eggs. You destroy the very thing that makes a personal brand so powerful. People have to be able to make a sincere and personal connection with the representative first, not with your brand. Once that connection is made, the connections to your brand will be obvious and much more meaningful. People will see that his or her content is home-based on your site, and of course your brand will be clear on all the profiles of your reps.

If you let people make the connection on their own, the transference of their trust in and liking for your reps over to your brand will occur more naturally, and therefore will be more “sticky.”

Multiply the connection opportunities

This recommendation is closely tied with the one about giving your representatives enough creative space and time to do their work well. In addition, make available to them multi-faceted, multi-channel opportunities to gain exposure. This is one of the secret weapons of real personal brad representatives: they can get into places where your brand logo never would.

For example, set aside budget to get your reps to important conferences. As they gain reputation and stature, they will get opportunities to speak at such events. Never underestimate the value of these in-real-life opportunities. Though they may not seem to have the potential reach of things like social media posting, they can be just as effective, sometimes more so. While Eric Enge and I believe that our content and social media presences help create fertile ground for business opportunities, we know that we have landed many of our best clients through our conference appearances.

You should also encourage your reps to take opportunities to get in front of other people’s audiences online. Whether by guest posting or being interviewed on podcasts, Hangouts, or other media shows, such occasions are yet another way where personal brands can get exposure in places to which you otherwise would have no access.

Your turn

Have you built an effective personal brand? If so, how has it benefited your company? Do you see it as worth the investment?

If you haven’t taken advantage of personal brands to help market your business, why not? What fears or concerns hold you back?

I’d love to hear from you in the comments!

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I truly believe in the power of partnerships. There have been some incredible partnerships that changed the fabric of our culture. Larry Page and Sergey Brin. William Procter and James Gamble. The Olson Twins.

Good partnerships provide support, motivation, and complementary skills, often allowing you to overcome hurdles faster and create some truly marvelous things. In consulting or any agency work, the concept of “partnership” should be the backbone of your relationship. Like a puzzle piece, sometimes the fit is initially difficult to find – if available at all. The truth is, you’re only secure if your clients are walking in the same direction as the flow of your service. If they’re walking against the current, you have what I believe to be the most detrimental predicament a service provider can have –a rift. That’s a truly offensive four-letter word.

What kind of rift are we talking about? Let’s do a little calculating.

First think about what you or your agency is really good at. Think about the components you have the most success with; this may actually be different than where you’re most experienced. Think about what you should be selling versus not (even if those items are currently on your menu – let’s be candid here, a lot of us casually promote services webelieve we should be selling even though it’s not a fully baked product or core competency). Think about the amount of time you really spent challenging a given service to make sure it’s truly impactful to a client versus your own bottom line.

Next, think about your past client debacles (if you haven’t stopped to perform a postmortem, you should). Chances are these led to events that cost you a lot of time, pain, and possibly money. They are the memories that make you shudder. Those are the days that made you dust off your resume and think about a career change.

Finally, how many of these past clients should have never been signed in the first place? How many simply weren’t a fit from the start? How many simply never had a shot at being successful with you – and vice-versa? This computation really needs serious consideration. Have you wasted everyone’s time?

There can be a costly fallout. I’ve seen talented team members quit over clients that simply could not be managed. I’ve seen my colleagues go so far as to cry or start seeking therapy (in part) because of overwhelming clients who were not getting what they expected and a parent company who wasn’t providing any relief. Sometimes these clients were bound to an annual contract which only made them more desperate and angry. Rifts like this can kill your business.

This should never happen.

Client/agency relationships are marriages, but marriages start with dating

I really like this 2011 post from A List Apart calledMarry Your Clients. A few years old, but nothing has changed. However, my post is going to talk about the courting part before the honeymoon.

My post also assumes you make more money on longer consulting relationships. If you’ve somehow built your model through routinely hunting new business with the expectation you’re going to get fired, then that’s a different story. For most of us however, on-boarding a client is a lot of work, both in terms of hours (which is money) and brainpower. If you “hit it off” with your client, you begin to know their business more intimately, as well as their goals and KPIs. The strategies get easier to build; they also tend to be more successful as you become aware of what their tastes and limitations are. You find you have things in common (perhaps you both enjoy long walks to the bank). You often become true partners with your clients, who in turn promote your ideas to their bosses. These are your most profitable engagements, as well as your most rewarding. They tend to last years, sometimes following your point-of-contact to their next jobs as well.

But you don’t get this way simply because both parties signed a legally-bounding document.

The truth is not all parties can work together. A lot of client/agency relationships end in divorce. Like in romance, sometimes you just aren’t compatible.

A different kind of online dating

After my first marriage went kaput, I’ll admit I went to Match.com. For those who never tried online dating, it’s really an exercise in personal marketing. You upload your most attractive pictures. You sell yourself above everyone else. You send communications back and forth to the interested parties where you work to craft the “perfect” response; as well as ask qualifying questions. I found it works pretty well – the online process saved me from potentially bad dates. Don’t get me wrong, I still have some awkward online dating stories…

With consulting, if we’re supposed to ultimately marry our clients, we should obviously be allowed to see if there’s a love connection. We should all be our own Chuck Woolery. I tend to think this stage is crucial, but often rushed by agencies or managed by a department outside of your own.

Some agencies seem to have a “no dating” policy. For some, it’s not uncommon to come in to work and have an email from a higher-up with the subject, “congratulations – you’re now married to a new client!” Whether it’s a client development department, or an add-on from an existing client, your marketing department is suddenly forced into an arranged marriage where you can only hope to live up to their expectations.

This is a recipe for disaster. I don’t like to run a business on luck and risk, so clearly this makes no sense to me.

But I’ve been there. I once worked for an agency that handed me a signed contract for a major underwear brand – but I didn’t even know we were even speaking to them. Before I had a chance to get the details, the VP of digital marketing called me. I did my best to understand what they were promised in terms of SEO goals without admitting I really had no clue about their business. The promises were unrealistic, but being somewhat timid and naïve back in the day, I went with it. Truth is, their expectations did not fit into our model, philosophies, or workflow. Ultimately I failed to deliver to their expectations. The contract ended early and I vowed to never let that happen again. Not just for the stress and anxiety it brought upon my team and me, but for the blatant neglect to the client as well.

With this being something I never forgot, I would occasionally bring this story up with others I met at networking events or conventions. I quickly learned this is far from an isolated incident occurring only to me. This is how some agencies build their business development departments.

Once again, this should never happen.

How to qualify a client

Let’s assume by now I have successfully inspired a few things:

A client/agency relationship should truly be a partnership akin to a good marriage.

A client should never be thrown into a model that doesn’t make sense for their business (i.e., your style of SEO services), and process should be in place for putting all the parties in the same room before a deal is signed.

Now we’re up to number 3:

Not all relationships work, so all parties should try to truly connect before there is a proposal. Don’t rush the signature!

Here are some of the things we do at Greenlane to really qualify a client. Before I continue, though, I’m proud to brag a little. With these practices in place, our close rate – that is, the companies we really want to work with – is 90% in our favor. Our retainment is also very high. Once we started being prudent with our intake, we’ve only lost a few companies due to funding issues or a change in their business model – not out of performance. I should also add that these tips work with all sizes of clients. While some of our 20+ clients are smaller businesses, we also have household brands and public companies, all of which could attest to going through this process with us.

It’s all in the details

Your website is your Match.com profile. Your website is your personality. If you’re vague or promotional or full of hype, only to get someone on the phone to which your “car salesman” gear kicks in, I don’t think you’re using the website to the best of its ability. People want to use the website to learn more about you before the reach out.

Our “about us” page is our third most visited page next to the homepage and pricing (outside of the blog). You can see an example from a Hotjar heatmap:

The truth is, I’m always tweaking (and A/B testing) our message on the about us page. This page is currently part of a funnel that we careful put together. The “about us” page is a quick but powerful overview putting our team front and center and highlighting our experience (including some past clients).

I believe the website’s more than a brochure. It’s a communication device. Don’t hide or muddle who you are. When I get a prospect email through our form, I always lead them to our “Are We The Right Fit” page. That’s right – I actually ask them to consider choosing wisely. Now at first glance, this might go against a conversion funnel that heats up the prospect and only encourages momentum, but this page has really been a strong asset. It’s crafted to transparently present our differentiators, values, and even our pricing. It’s also crafted to discourage those who aren’t a good fit. You can find this pagehere. Even our URL provides the “Are We The Right Fit” question.

We want prospects to make a good decision. We care so much about companies doing great that we’d rather you find someone else if our model isn’t perfect. Sure, sometimes after pointing someone to that link, they never return. That’s OK. Just like a dating profile, this page is designed to target a certain kind of interest. Time is a commodity in agency life – no sense in wasting it on a conversation that isn’t qualified. When we do catch a prospect after reviewing the page and hear, “we went with another firm who better suits our needs,” it actually doesn’t feel like a loss at all.

Everyone who comes back goes into our pipeline. At this stage they all get followed up on with a phone call. If they aren’t a good fit from the get go we actually try to introduce them to other SEO companies or consultants who would be a better fit for them. But 9 times out of 10, it’s an amazing conversation.

Never drop the transparency

There are a few things I try to tell all the prospects I ultimately speak with. One, I openly admit I’m not a salesman. I couldn’t sell ice water to people in hell. But I’m good at being really candid about our strengths and experiences.

Now this one tends to surprise some, especially in the larger agency setting. We admit that we are really choosy about the clients we take on. For our model, we need clients who are flexible, fast moving, interested in brand building, and interested in long-term relationships. We want clients who think in terms of strategy and will let us work with their existing marketing team and vendors. We audit them for their understanding of SEO services and tell them how we’re either alike or different.

I don’t think a prospect call goes by without me saying, “while you’re checking us out to see if we’re a good fit, we’re doing the same for you.” Then, if the call goes great, I let them know we’d like a follow up call to continue (a second date if you will). This follow up call has been where the real decision gets made.

Ask the right questions

I’ve vetted the opportunity, now my partner – who naturally has a different way of approaching opportunities and relationships – asks a different set of questions. This adds a whole different dimension and works to catch the questions I may not have asked. We’ve had companies ready to sign on the first call, to which I’ve had to divert any signatures until the next conversation. This too may seem counter-intuitive to traditional business development, but we find it extremely valuable. It’s true that we could have more clients in our current book of business, but I can proudly state that every current client is exactly who we want to be with; this is very much because of everything you’ve read so far.

On each call we have a list of qualifying questions that we ask. Most are “must answer” questions, while others can roll into a needs analysis questionnaire that we give to each signed client. The purpose of the needs analysis is to get more granular into business items (such as seasonal trends, industry intelligence, etc.) for the intention of developing strategies. With so much to ask, it’s important to be respectful of the prospects’ time. At this point they’ve usually already indicated they’ve read our website, can afford our prices, and feel like we’re a good fit.

Many times prospects start with their introduction and answer some of our questions. While they speak, I intently listen and take many notes.

These are 13 questions from my list that I always make sure get answered on a call, with some rationale:

Questions for the prospect:

1. Can you describe your business model and products/services?

What do you sell?

B2B or B2C

Retail or lead generation?

Rationale: sometimes when reviewing the website it’s not immediately clear what kind of business they’re in. Perhaps the site just does a bad job, or sometimes their real money making services are deeper in the site and easily missed by a fast scan. One of our clients works with the government and seems to have an obvious model, but the real profit is from a by-product, something we would have never picked up on during our initial review of the website. It’s important to find out exactly what the company does. Is it interesting? Can you stay engaged? Is it a sound model that you believe in? Is it a space you have experience in?

2. What has been your experience with [YOUR SERVICE] in the past?

Rationale: Many times, especially if your model is different, a prospect may have a preconceived notion of what you actually do. Let’s take SEO as an example – there are several different styles of SEO services. If they had a link building company in the past, and you’re a more holistic SEO consulting practice, their point of reference may only be with what they’ve experienced. They may even have a bad taste in their mouth from a previous engagement, which gives you a chance to air it out and see how you compare. This is also a chance to know if you’re potentially playing with a penalized site.

3. What are your [PPC/SEO/etc.] goals?

Rationale: Do they have realistic goals, or lofty, impossible goals? Be candid – tell them if you don’t think you can reach the goals on the budget they have, or if you think they should choose other goals. Don’t align yourself with goals you can’t hit. This is where many conversations could end.

4. What’s your mission or positioning statement?

Rationale: If you’re going to do more than just pump up their rankings, you probably want to know the full story. This should provide a glimpse into other marketing the prospect is executing.

5. How do you stand out?

Rationale: Sometimes this is answered with the question above. If not, really dig up the differentiators. Those are typically the key items to build campaigns on. Whether they are trying to create a new market segment or have a redundant offering, this can help you set timeline and success expectations.

6. Are you comfortable with an agency that may challenge your plans and ideas?

Rationale: This is one of my favorite questions. There are many who hire an agency and expect “yes-men.” Personally I believe an agency or consultant should be partners; that is, not afraid to fight for what they know is right for the benefit of the client. You shouldn’t be afraid of injury:

7. Who are your competitors?

Rationale: Not only do you want this for competitive benchmarking, but this can often help you understand more about the prospect. Not to mention, how big a hill you might have to climb to start competing on head terms.

8. What is your business reach? (local, national, international)?

Rationale: An international client is going to need more work than a domestic client. A local client is going to need an expertise in local search. Knowing the scope of the company can help you align your skills with their targets.

9. What CMS are you on?

Rationale: This is a big one. It tells you how much flexibility you will have. WordPress? Great – you’ll probably have a lot of access to files and templates. A proprietary CMS or enterprise solution? Uh-oh. That probably means tickets and project queues. Are you OK with that?

10. What does your internal team look like?

Rationale: Another important question. Who will you be working with? What skill sets? Will you be able to sit at the table with other vendors too? If you’re being hired to fill in the gaps, make sure you have the skills to do so. I ask about copywriters, developers, designers, and link builders at a minimum.

11. What do you use for analytics?

Rationale: A tool like Wappalyzer can probably tell you, but sometimes bigger companies have their own custom analytics through their host. Sometimes it’s bigger than Google Analytics, like Omniture. Will you be allowed to have direct access to it? You’d be surprised how often we hear no.

12. How big is your site? Do you have other properties?

Rationale: It’s surprising how often a prospect forgets to mention those 30+ subdomains and microsites. If the prospect envisions it as part of the deal, you should at least be aware of how far the core website extends.

13. What is your budget, preferred start time, and end date?

Rationale: The biggest question of all. Do they even meet your fee requirements? Are you staffed and ready to take on the work? Sure, talking money can be tough, but if you post your rates firm, the prospect is generally more open to talk budget. They don’t feel like a negotiation is going to happen.

Conclusion

While these are the core questions we use, I’m sure the list will eventually grow. I don’t think you should copy our list, or the order. You should ultimately create your own. Every agency or consultant has different requirements, and interviewing your prospect is as important as allowing them to interview you. But remember, you don’t have to have all the business. Just the right kind of business. You will grow organically from your positive experiences. We all hear about “those other agencies” and how they consistently fail to meet client expectations. Next to “do great work,” this is one powerful way to keep off that list.

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Metrics are really only effective markers of business success if they’re measuring your progress toward your organization’s goals. How, though, do we make the leap from goals to reportable metrics? In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Dana DiTomaso (a partner at Kick Point and a MozCon 2014 speaker!) walks us through that process.

Want to see more from Dana? You can watch her presentation “Prove Your Value” fromMozCon 2014 for free. (If you’re looking to turn turn the marketing learning volume up to 11, you can purchase all of the MozCon presentations on that page!)

For reference, here’s a still of this week’s whiteboard!

Video transcription

Hi, I’m Dana DiTomaso. I work at Kick Point, which is a digital marketing agency in Edmonton. I presented at MozCon 2014 this year, talking about reporting and how people love it so much and how you can make your reporting better.

One of the slides in my presentation that people had a lot of questions about afterwards was what you see behind me. This is not my handwriting. It’s much better than my handwriting. Left-handers and whiteboards don’t mix. One of the things that we wanted to talk in this slide was you can take a goal that the client gives you and drill it down to what you report on in the actual report. The reason why you do this is that you can report on basically everything. That’s one of our super powers as a digital marketer. Because of that, it means that you’re able to take what the client says are their business goals and turn it into things that you actually report on. Because you’re able to do this for a client, they’re much more likely to like you, keep paying their bills, keep you around, last company fired when all the contractor budgets get cut, those sorts of things.

We find that reporting to clients goals proves your value much more strongly than anything else you could possibly do, including delivering great results, to be honest. Clients appreciate honesty, and they appreciate it when you are able to say, “This is what we’re doing to meet your goals. This is the work and here’s how it all fits together.” You’ll have an easier time selling what it is that you do. The client’s going to be happy, you’re going to be happy, everybody’s happy.

Let’s start with how this works. The idea here is you take the client’s goal. When we start with a client, we say to them, “What are your business goals for this year and next year? Give us all your goals.” They often say, “Oh, no marketing company has ever asked for this before,” which is kind of crazy. So start asking your clients for these goals. Again, that’s already a competitive differentiator, and this is before the client has even signed on with us. This is in the proposal meeting. After you’ve done your research, you can come back to the client and say, “Here’s how we’re going to break down your goals into the strategy that we’re going to execute on once you sign on the nice dotted line and give us a check.”

I find that definitely doing that research part is an important part of our proposal process. It might be an important part of yours. What we really like to focus on is making that sure we understand all the pieces of how the client’s project is going to fit together before we tell them how much it’s going to be to execute on it. Because of that, not all clients are like, “Oh I have to pay you money, and then I have to pay you money again.” They are kind of confused, but at the same time you have a way better grasp of what’s going to happen. There are no nasty surprises like, “Oh, you paid a company to black hat link building for you. Well, that’s great.” Then you’re going to have to revise your estimate, etc., etc., etc.

Doing this goal setting as a part of the research process, before you quote on the actual piece, is crucial. If a client doesn’t agree to it, we actually don’t work with them as a client. I know it means that you get less business, but at the same time you get way better business. Clients who are invested in this process are awesome clients.

Back to the goals, this is a real goal from one of our clients — increase gross sales to $17.5 million in 2014. For this client, to set some context, they have recently cancelled all of their print. They weren’t doing any radio or TV. It was just print advertising. They have gone strictly digital. What they’re going to get leads in now is word-of-mouth, referral, being known in the industry, and digital marketing. Great, so now we have this goal.

The question is: How do we track that goal? What do we need to find out in order to make sure we’re delivering on that goal? That gets broken down into KPIs, key performance indicators. That’s gross sales, average sale size, and average time to close sale. That’s the three things we need from the client. Because we communicate to this client at the very beginning, we can then set up a process to say, “Okay, so when it’s report time at the end of the month, this is the kind of stuff that we need from you.” The client is ready, able to deliver it right away. It’s not a huge turnaround time on the reports.

The next thing is tactics. Of course, there are way more tactics than this. This is kind of a broad overview of the tactics that you think about. This includes things like link building or content marketing or outreach or anything like that. What we’re looking at right now is: How are we going to deliver, and how are we going to deliver on our end? What is the stuff we’re thinking about when we actually do stuff like content marketing?

So this helps to sharpen your focus to say, “All right, we’re going to right a blog post about how our client is really awesome at environmental sustainability,” for example. Then we know that we need to make sure that we’re setting up lead tracking and lead scoring and that there’s a nice call-to-action at the end of that content piece, because we need to make sure that it turns into leads, and blah, blah, blah.

A couple of tactics, use lead tracking to determine the percentage of lead sources per industry and their source. For this client, they want to sell more to specific industries, so we want to make sure that we’re tracking that on the form. There is a drop-down on the form, but also people hate self-reporting. They’re really bad at it. They often pick “other” or “I don’t want to tell you” or they just don’t fill out the form. If you can remove that and then try to get the industry in some other way, either through demographic information. For example, once you get your email address, you can look it up. If it’s a client with a low volume of leads, that can be really effective or some other method, and then you can remove that from the form. That helps improve your close rate.

Lead scoring to identify high close rate, fast closing leads and their source. What we want to know is not just how many leads did you get, but what were the best leads. Which ones closed the fastest? Which ones gave you the most money? Let’s get more of these. We want to find out their source so we can say, “Wow, that referral campaign we did was really amazing. Let’s make sure we do more of that.” That’s the tactics.

Next is metrics. This is what are we going to pull out of Google Analytics or whatever reporting method you’re using. For example, this could also be a social goal that’s related strictly to social media, such as improving share of voice in your industry. In that case, you would look at different metrics like the share of voice. You would look at mentions. There’s lots of different stuff that you can look at. For this case, we’re looking at lead form fills and specifically the multi-attribution model. I want to take a minute to talk about that. I think that by default, of course, Google Analytics reports on the click before the last click attribution model. What we want to report on is all the different steps that went into that. Annie Cushing had a great quote about this, “Reporting on last click attribution in 2014 is like buying a football team and only paying the players who score.” If you only report on last-attribution modeling, the problem is that you are shortchanging yourself. Often, for example, organic traffic is very high up the funnel. We want to make sure that we’re getting credit for every touch point that the client makes before they fill out that form.

The first time you present multi-attribution modeling to a client, if you aren’t doing it already, and if you’re not doing it already, then start. I know it takes a little bit of work with customer reporting and stuff, but it’s totally worth it. You usually have to sit down and explain to the client. I have used Annie’s quote. It works really great to explain how this stuff works. Just sit down with them and show them and actually open up Google Analytics and take them through the model. Say, “Look at all these different paths. Isn’t this crazy? Did you know somebody visited your website 78 times before they filled out form?”

They are often horrified, but also a little confused, as we all are about user behavior on the Internet. I find that it’s important to show the client this so that they understand and they get a real appreciation of all the different pieces that come in together. There’s very rarely a, “I clicked on your ad. I filled out a form.” That’s not necessarily a transaction that happens a lot, especially in the B2B space, which is where this client is.

Make sure that you’re using multi-attribution in all your reporting, that you’re explaining it, and that you’re giving credit where credit is due, even if it isn’t something that you particularly did. Let’s say you’re not responsible for email marketing. That’s a client. Email marketing can be a really important channel, drives lots of leads. No, you didn’t do it, but report on it. The client is going to appreciate that. Make sure you use the multi-attribution model.

In the report itself, now we know these are the metrics you’re going to report on: number of leads; attribute leads to channels, this is really important; and attribute high value leads to channels. This is the golden thing that’s going to be able to tell us what is really working well for this client and what we need to focus on in the future.

Then, of course, that rolls all the way back up to this goal again. By putting all the pieces together, you can become incredibly valuable to your clients. They appreciate honest, accurate reporting. They appreciate reporting that relates back to their business goals, so then when it comes time for your client’s boss to ask questions about why they’re paying all that money to the digital marketing agency, they can come back and say, “Look what they did to hit those goals.” That should help you out with reporting. Thanks.

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